[opencms-dev] OpenCms 4.4 released

[alex at opencms.com]

The major release 4.4 of OpenCms is now available from the OpenCms website
http://www.opencms.org.

The new release includes numerous improvements including a page element
caching mechanism that leads to an 10x increase in speed of page delivery.
It's also now possible to create a project diretly from the workplace, to
define projects that remain after publishing and to directly publish
individual pages from a project. Project creating and publishing times have
been greatly reduced. Undelete allows reconstruction of a deleted page, and
Undo changes drops all changes done to a page in a project. The new history
function saves old versions of published pages and allows easy
reconstruction of such an old version. The reference servlet engine has been
shifted to Tomcat. Installation is much easier because of the integrated
setup wizard. Components have been updated to the newest versions. The
CmsShell now can be programmed using Javascript. Also, OpenCms release 4.4
contains a lot of smaller improvements and bug fixes.

One big improvement is the new setup wizard. Installation of OpenCms 4.4 is
as easy as never before (ok, it actually _never_ was easy before, so it's
the first time it actually _is_ easy ;-). OpenCms is now bundled in a
standard .WAR archive and can be deployed on all Servlet engines that
support this standard. After deployment, a JSP application is used to set
required parameters, including database connection strings. The user is then
guided through some simple steps that setup and fill the neccessary database
tables and finally import all the workplace data. With the setup wizard,
installing OpenCms is a matter of minutes.

>From Version 4.4 onward OpenCms uses the LGPL license. The complete source
code of OpenCms was re-issued under this license. The source code for the
older Versions is still available using the GPL license. The main reason for
changing to LGPL was that we always wanted it to be possible to develop
OpenCms modules that are using another form of license. We believed that
this was possible using GPL for the core, but not for modules running on the
core. Some comments on that point of view (the most important coming from
Richard Stallman, founder of the FSF) have pointed out that his is not
possible with the GPL. All Modules must be GPL, too. Therfore, from release
4.4. onwards, the OpenCms core uses the LGPL license. The LGPL allows the
coexistance of the "library" (in our case the OpenCms core system) with
components using another form of license.

Many thanks to all who have contributed to this release.

Best Regards,

Alexander Kandzior
OpenCms Group